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Video Game Industry Thread: Master Chief -- script delivery boy

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I wish there was a fighting game built as an online focused platform. Similar to WoW, built from the ground up to accommodate frequent balance patches, content patches and occasional payed expansions, but a continuous single game. As if Street Fighter 4, MvC3, SFxT and so on were all a single interlinked product.

It's a very pie in the sky wish given most fighting games can't even figure out online play in a satisfactory form.

Sony and Microsoft's patch policies are a whole other can of worms. Uberent, Team Meat and Double Fine each came out and said a patch on 360 costs 40,000 after an initial free patch. I'm not familiar with Sony's policy though.

40k for every patch? holy fuck!
no wonder those guys hate making games for XBLA, MS makes it as hard as possible it seems

Sony and Microsoft's patch policies are a whole other can of worms. Uberent, Team Meat and Double Fine each came out and said a patch on 360 costs 40,000 after an initial free patch. I'm not familiar with Sony's policy though.

40k for every patch? holy fuck!
no wonder those guys hate making games for XBLA, MS makes it as hard as possible it seems

That barely covers their bandwidth costs. Microsoft is, after all, hosting the patch and distributing it over Live themselves. Not to mention, they provide QA on everything as standard.

I think it's also punitive, in a sense. That's why the first patch is free. Stops people making shitty, buggy games and provides financial incentive to do your own goddamn QA before launch.

You know, aside from the true indie scene with the dev stuff, Live Arcade has a much higher quality threshold than most services. I mean, they're complete games, not half finished sketches fixed after launch.

Bandwidth costs seems.. odd. I mean, a small-ass game shouldn't be using nearly the amount of bandwidth per patch than, say, Monday Night Combat would. Why are they judged on the same scale?

Then again, if it were me, I'd do something like having the various Xboxes serve as P2P/bittorrent seeders for other players with the patch, a la World of Warcraft, to speed up download times and keep bandwidth costs low/distributed.

Because it's easier to have a base rate than calculate it on a case by case basis? I'd imagine a Skyrim patch uses significantly more bandwidth than 40,000 dollars worth. It averages out across the board. Which is why big developers like Bethesda can afford to release buggy games.

Also, consider that every console that connects to LIVE (Silver and Gold) will download the title update. Some updates can be quite large and the more popular the game is, the more it happens. And have you ever deleted the update or cleared your cache? Then you have to re-download it.

As Scarab suggests, it's both for overhead costs and to try and make sure that devs/pubs don't abuse the idea.

But well it's only 15 bucks and they said they would add more later so whatever

Here's my thing. MvC3 has loads and loads of characters. And they all die from copious amounts of Wesker. It burns me badly that this is the case. With my brother moved out, online play for fighting games is important to me. So I'd rather take a small roster if the online experience is better. This is also why I forgive SC5's shitsack of a story mode.

That is a thing. Like, everyone loves fighting games with enough characters in them, but there's also a point where there's too many characters, and it doesn't look that bad on the roster screen, but when you get in the game itself...

Take the new Mortal Kombat. I think it's pretty great. But I also think it's kind of funny that in the traditional arcade mode, you will only fight, like, a third of the roster before you're at the bosses. I don't know if that's a waste or what, but, maybe 25 is too much? Can you really zero in on what makes one character better than three other characters for your playing style?

Mind you, most of the characters are cool-looking and have their own flair, but...I really think, if Skullgirls is as good as it wants to be, that it's to their credit if they can make a solid, enjoyable game with seven playable characters. I'd argue it might be more difficult to do fighter with that few than it would be to do one with fifteen or sixteen, because with that many you can spread shit around a little more, and create these variants that share qualities and it all kinds of runs together and it's harder to critique because it's harder to isolate the failings. Suddenly you can have two or three characters that are half-baked but no one notices because of all the others that people prefer to play anyway. Granted, a crap game is a crap game, but if you've only got seven characters, you really got make sure everything you have is top-shelf.

None of the other services have problems with people abusing the system, even stuff like Steam where there are a bunch of indies. Buggy games generally don't sell well.

I can agree if bugs alone were the case, than MS's "get it right the first time" policy would be okay, but for something like competitive multiplayer, tweaking and balance patching shouldn't have to end, ever. This can depend on how much competitive multiplayer is a core part of a game, such as a fighting game, RTS, Action RTS, Racing Game, Sports Game and so on will always need more than one tweak as win/loss statistics are found and community reactions go. They keep a game's online community healthy.

Uberent and Team Meat were most vocal about this, Team Meat being nastiest about it. Uberent said they had a feature in place for MNC where every time you played online, you would get the freshest updated stats before a round of MNC Started.

I like LIVE. A lot. XBLA is the one thing holding me back from playing PC exclusively. But devs should be able to patch, tweak and balance their games as much as long as the communities want to keep playing it. And the dev comments out there reflect they believe that too.

Cantido on April 2012

3DS Friendcode 5413-1311-3767

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agoajOne is the loneliest numberyou could ever chuRegistered Userregular

As microtransactions become more and more common, removing barriers to patching helps keep communities healthy. This helps make the company money. Didn't Capcom not even make it so other people could even see the different colored costumes because that would require a patch?

as someone who has spent as much money on my xbox/accessories/live sub/arcade games you can bet your sweet ass i'm going to call MS on bullshit. they do pull some foul stuff sometimes, there's no point in defending their shitty practices, we need to tell them what they are doing wrong so they can learn to give us a better experience.

I like how it's a shitty practice that MS charges devs money as an encouragement to get their game right the first time. Or do I not constantly see people bitching about how devs are just so damned lazy and can't get anything right and how horrible it is that they use this update-after-release process to just ship terribly buggy games and use consumers as unpaid testers?

Nah, you're right. MS should reverse this practice because it's just patently unfair.

Hey, if devs think MS is giving them a raw deal, then by all means, go somewhere else. And when the content dries up, MS can either make the changes you deem necessary or they'll just go out of business since all that patch money dried up. And when the content goes away, then all those dumbass subscribers paying '$15' per month (somehow) will stop pissing away their money on such a worthless enterprise. You know, since everybody else does so much better at it for far, far less.

Poor, poor Team Meat and Double Fine... I feel real bad about how horrible it is that MS wants them to get their own shit right. Boo freaking hoo. Go to Steam and quit bitching about it if it's so bad.

I've never had an issue with paying for Live service and I've had a Live account since pretty much Live existed and even I'm starting to wonder if I want to bother with it any more. I've got multiple Netflix-ready devices that don't cost anything extra to use, 360 patching times suck ass, and I don't have the time any more for much multiplayer.

A decent enough service when it started, but now it's lagging behind pretty badly and dragging consumer satisfaction down with it thanks to certification processes and patch fees.

I like how it's a shitty practice that MS charges devs money as an encouragement to get their game right the first time. Or do I not constantly see people bitching about how devs are just so damned lazy and can't get anything right and how horrible it is that they use this update-after-release process to just ship terribly buggy games and use consumers as unpaid testers?

Nah, you're right. MS should reverse this practice because it's just patently unfair.

Hey, if devs think MS is giving them a raw deal, then by all means, go somewhere else. And when the content dries up, MS can either make the changes you deem necessary or they'll just go out of business since all that patch money dried up. And when the content goes away, then all those dumbass subscribers paying '$15' per month (somehow) will stop pissing away their money on such a worthless enterprise. You know, since everybody else does so much better at it for far, far less.

Poor, poor Team Meat and Double Fine... I feel real bad about how horrible it is that MS wants them to get their own shit right. Boo freaking hoo. Go to Steam and quit bitching about it if it's so bad.

Starcraft was patched, balanced and rebalanced for TEN FUCKING YEARS. It only recently got it's "final" patch. It has nothing to do with the competence of the devs, but the nature of competitive online play. And moving to Steam is exactly what all three devs did, and what other devs will continue to do.

This is why I'm enjoying SMNC on PC, not on XBLA, because such a game can't exist there.

1) Get the cheapest paid version of Live that you can. Either the one-month recurring or a three-month card, if you can find one for less than the $24 MSRP. A good method is also to get a subscription that has some sort of games bonus as an added incentive. They just ended a deal where you paid $40 for six months of Live and got Halo Reach, Fable III, Kinect Sports, The Gunstringer and...some other game for free.
2) Cancel any recurring billing that will occur at the end of the subscription period.
3) Let Live subscription run out.
4) When it does, there will be crazy-ass ads all over the dashboard for Live at really cheap costs. Right now I'm in the middle of a "2 months for $2" deal. These deals will always pop up, like clockwork, if the subscription that just ended was one that you actually paid full-price for.

And as much as I detest the trend of "release and fix it later", Microsoft's crappy way of dealing with 3rd-party patching does jack shit to combat that. All it effectively does is discourage third-party devs from being able fix the things they should be able to fix or apply balance patches; it turns out that games are actually pretty damn complicated, what with having the programming equivalent of thousands upon thousands of moving parts. Glitches happen.

Microsoft certainly isn't responsible for the mistakes devs/publishers make, but saying "boo hoo, they should use another service" is a really lousy, short-sighted idea, for the players and for Microsoft. There's nothing stupid about implementing a better, patch-friendly service so things are better for everybody.

And a console is not a PC. Most people don't expect to be constantly downloading tweaks to gameplay experiences.

Why not? This is the case with "serious gamers" on the PC, and with "casual gamers" on iOS devices. Why should consoles get a pass? Shit, I think gameplay-tweaking patches and updates should hit much more often on consoles.

And a console is not a PC. Most people don't expect to be constantly downloading tweaks to gameplay experiences.

Why not? This is the case with "serious gamers" on the PC, and with "casual gamers" on iOS devices. Why should consoles get a pass? Shit, I think gameplay-tweaking patches and updates should hit much more often on consoles.

Not so much serious gamer as it is 2 decades of consoles that didn't allow downloads.

I don't have a problem with patches and very much am happy that Bethesda games have them, but I also don't see any issue with Microsoft charging publishers.

Maybe Minecraft will lead the way to a sub category of games that are set from the beginning to be allowed to update often.

Gawd I just realised this board is gonna be filled with "next-gen" being used as if it's a meaningful word where it isn't again.
Plus everyother gaming site on the internet.

It's that time again, that magical season where people forget everything that has happened up until this point in the gaming industry and raise their starry eyes to the heavens, expecting the coming of the new nirvana.